From my last press trip. Seems ages ago now.
A handy local’s guide to Las Vegas
An excellent guide to Las Vegas from one of the locals can be found at Joe In and Around Vegas (via Rullsenberg). Disappointed to see no mention of The Venetian, my favourite hotel there, but I guess if you’re not into art, shopping or things Italian, it’d be quite dull.
See how shiny it is? And that was in October last year my friends.
First Direct and some green fudge
Ooh. First Direct claims to be the first direct banking operation to go carbon neutral. Good on them.
Some of the stats seem a little interesting though:
“Conscious of the impact 3400 people have getting to and from work, three years ago it introduced the Green Travel Plan which includes:
- a car sharing database
- shuttle bus between Leeds Train Station and Stourton
- subsidised travel cards to encourage more people to use the buses and trains.
- The initiative has led to 150 fewer cars being brought to work each day and a staggering 98% increase in the number of people using public transport.”
So the number of people using public transport has doubled, but of 3,400 people, only 150 fewer cars are being used?
Obviously, it’s a bit tricky with that shuttle bus option added, since we don’t know if that counts as public transport. But if there are 150 fewer cars being used, with say a generous 1.5 people per car, that means there are 225 fewer people travelling by cars. If they all go by public transport, that means that there were already 225 people (98% or so) going by public transport, taking the total up to… 450 people out of 3,400. If half went by shuttle bus instead of car or bus and the shuttle bus doesn’t count as public transport, then there’ll only be 225 travelling by public transport. And so on.
So by the looks of it, we have nearly 3,000 out of the 3,400 employees going by some form of transport that isn’t publicly owned. Car-sharing, shuttle buses, etc are good things, but that’s still an awful lot of people not using public transport. And the figures don’t say how many employees First Direct has now, rather than three years ago.
I could ring up and ask, but as always, I’m feeling a bit lazy.
Cardiff Bay
I spent the weekend in Cardiff Bay, which is pretty impressive, I have to say, even if they seem to be allergic to apostrophes there. Not much to say, other than there some’s pretty impressive architecture down there and to ignore the tour bus since one of the guides is very bad indeed and you might be unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of her “guidance”.
More tomorrow, where I’ll be talking about the hotel we were staying at.
Green press trips
Press trips are all very nice. Who doesn’t enjoy flying off to far-away destinations, even if you don’t get to see much except the inside of a hotel at the other end? There is, however, a problem for any journalist who worries about green issues. All those plane flights can overwhelm all your good work when you’re at home. In fact, probably just one trip will result in your using up your CO2 allowance for the year. What to do, what to do?
Turns out that some of the airlines operate a carbon neutral policy. You just go to their web site, work out how much CO2 your trips have pumped out, pony up a little cash and the airline will put that money towards offsetting those CO2 emissions in an approved scheme. It should all result in your trip not having put out any net CO2 at all.
That’s the theory anyway. No doubt someone will point out that it’s all a con, doesn’t work, etc. I’d like to think it does until I hear evidence to the contrary. So I’m off to the BA web site’s offset scheme right now to pay my carbon tax for my last two press trips. I’ll have to see if BMI does an offset scheme for my little holiday in Glasgow.
The trouble with this though is that I’m now paying for my press trip, which offends my natural inalienable journo’s right to freebies. Hopefully, it’s tax deductible at the least. Maybe in future press-trip organisers will pay for the carbon offset, too. How about it PR people?
UPDATE: Turns out you can do carbon offsetting for almost anything at Climate Care; return trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Monaco worked out at £15 in total to offset, which isn’t bad, is it?
Pictures from Monaco
Here are a few pictures of Monaco. Average temperature yesterday was 25ºC. As you might expect, since I had approximately 15 minutes to explore Monaco during my whole time there (deadlines is deadlines, as they say, and although I could have stayed the night, there’s an article I need to write today, and a few interviews that need conducting), most of these are from within 100 metres of the Meridien hotel in which the press briefing was being held. All the same, I think you can see that Monaco’s really, really nice, particularly in June.
Business class on BA
So I’m at the gate, ready to board the flight back to London from Nice from my press trip. I’ve been impressed by Nice’s clever plan of having two lines for boarding – one for rows 24 and upwards and one for everyone else. Certainly speeded things up a bit. When what should happen but the person checking my boarding pass frowns. I’m not coming up on her system. She passes it to her colleague, who searches her system and delights me by informing me that I’ve been upgraded from “Euro traveller” to “Business class”.
“Excellent,” I think to myself. “I’ve never been business class with BA before. I wonder what it’s like.”
Well, I’m writing this on the plane right now and I’d have to say, not much different from economy.
Does it have more leg room or more space? No.
Does it have WiFi access? No
Does it have power sockets in the arm rests for laptops? No
Surely it must be quieter and more conducive to work in some way? Well, that screaming baby on the other side of the plane isn’t making it seem very conducive to work.
In actual fact, the only differences I’ve spotted so far are that I could have used the under-equipped lounge if I’d known that I was going to be upgraded (I actually did get to use the lounge, but only because Jeff Kimbell at Dell smuggled me in on his card); and you get better cutlery with the meal. The meal itself isn’t that much better, particularly since they substituted the usual functional block of cheese they provide for the biscuits with some icky blue cheese that they can probably smell in China from this altitude.
Maybe it’s better on the long haul flights, but for the short hauls, economy is as good as business class, I reckon, and a damn sight cheaper.
Weirdest idea for a Las Vegas casino yet
We’ve already learnt about one new Las Vegas hotel and casino this week. Now here comes another one. But it’s the weirdest one yet. It’s based on the magazine Maxim.
On one level, you can see where they’re coming from: Las Vegas isn’t called the “city of sin” for nothing. But a hotel designed primarily for teenage boys without much experience of women? Is that going to pay back the $1.2 billion needed to build it?
Still, maybe it’ll be like the Excalibur: there are plenty of people who stay in the Excalibur who aren’t there for the dragons and knights, but because they need a relatively cheap place to stay on the Strip that isn’t too shabby. I imagine the same might be true for Maxim Hotel and Casino. It’s actually going to have a reasonable nice location – close to Circus, Circus – since the north end of the Strip doesn’t yet have any of the top-grade hotels that the south and middle have been accumulating since the start of the 90s. Unless you count the Stratosphere, which I don’t.
Press trip season is upon us
May has come and gone, spring is here and summer is almost upon us. That must mean it’s press trip season. I’m off to Monaco tomorrow, thanks to Dell, who seem very fond of whisking journalists off to foreign climes for a day to announce things they’re going to press release the next day. Not that I’m complaining: you just don’t get this on consumer IT mags – God bless trade mags!
Anyway, probably no blogging tomorrow, but I’ll bring you back pictures of airports, train stations and probably not much Monaco on Wednesday. Assuming my camera doesn’t get nicked like it did in Zaragoza.
Since it’s nearly a year since that particular event took place, I’m finally able to cancel the contract that I took out with Orange when I got back from that press trip. Despite really wanting to like Orange, they’ve been nothing but rubbish and I’m paying out about £30 a month on a contract, even though I work from home and barely use the phone. So adios Orange, hello Virgin Mobile, I hope.
I say/write ‘I hope’ because getting an address to send my request to is particularly hard now they’ve merged with Wanadoo and redesigned their site. I’ve already tried speaking to a customer service rep, who apologised for Orange being rubbish at customer service and then told me to contact the company nearer the time. He really wasn’t getting it, was he? I’ll keep you updated on my progress.
New hotel on the way to Vegas
I wouldn’t have predicted a Swiss lakefront as the theme for the next big Vegas hotel, but it’s on the way, due to appear in 2009 right opposite the Wynn Hotel (Isn’t the Fashion Show Mall, opposite, though?) where the New Frontier Casino now is. Sounds impressive, too. A London Eye in Las Vegas… Wow.